Dance to the music.

Time to Settle Accounts

February 20, 2012: Dance to the music.

The two musicians sat in the Jackson Blue Line station in the early afternoon, one on drums, the other on guitar, playing for the passengers. The guitarist sat atop his amp. The drummer sat on a white bucket and used a green bucket as his snare with a tom in front of him and a cymbal propped up with a drum stick in a red crate.

Surrounding them in a wide, silent, stationary semi-circle were packs of passengers who, despite their obvious interest, remained distant. One woman, though, was dancing, snapping her fingers and kicking her heels. She walked in front of the band and shouted, “Y’all got a card?”

The drummer pointed to a sign in front of their set-up. “Adrian and Mark Duet” said the sign. She snapped a picture, and then returned to her friend, one of the silent masses.

“Come on, dance girl!” she said. She was now filming the duet, and would turn the camera on herself and make funked-out dance faces and yell things like “Damn, they hot!” and stalk her reticent friend with the camera as she attempted escape by circling the posts. “You should be dancing!”

With her boots she was over six feet, long legs in narrow jeans and a beige leather jacket. Her heels stomped the floor and her curly hair spun and her shoulders rolled and she loved it.

“I don’t get people,” she said to her friend still trying to ignore her. “You know these people feeling it. They need to dance!”

“Maybe they don’t feel like it.”

“Bull. They want to dance. They’re just trying to be respectable. Come on y’all – it’s Thursday! You’re at the train! Dance!”

She turned the camera on herself again and shook her head, and then stopped the camera and put it in her coat pocket. “I’m turning 40,” she told her friend. “I’m sick of respectability. When it’s time to dance, you should dance. What’s so hard about that?”